As someone who supports thousands of people in staying Bright throughout the year, I’m sensitive to this time of year. I’ve talked about Thanksgiving before in these vlogs. Go to Brightlineeating.com or YouTube and type in “Thanksgiving” and you can find all my past vlogs on how to navigate Thanksgiving shiny Bright. This year, though, I want to talk about a particular facet of eating Bright: whether or not to change your food plan for a holiday or special occasion. For example, let’s say...

Let’s talk about food thoughts and cravings—the differences between them and how to navigate them. We’re heading into the holiday season in the U.S., and food goes along with those holidays. Many of us experience profound food cravings. A food craving is like a dragon. Dragons are scary and intense, and feel like they can swoop in and then swallow us alive. They motivate us to fulfill their wants and desires. They’re hard to escape from—much like cravings. With cravings, it can take...

Sometimes life gets really lifey. We say that a lot in Bright Line Eating. It’s true, isn’t it? Life just gets lifey. There are levels of “lifeyness”. There’s intense work stress. There’s long-term caretaking for someone who is ailing. There’s having kids who are struggling. And then there are more extreme examples, that are just next-level stressors. Traumatic things. People I know and love have experienced these things. Coming home to find your life partner dead from suicide. Experiencing...

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the most important book ever published about addiction is Alcoholics Anonymous—"The Big Book”—published in 1939. It has so much wisdom that people who have addictions need to understand. People with an addiction have a switch in their brain that flips when they take a substance into their bodies. It kicks off a craving that is overpowering. They lose all choice about whether or not to consume that substance. They also have a mental twist that the book calls “the...

This vlog is not our usual weekly update. It's an emergency vlog, coming out on a Friday. It's been years since I felt the need to shoot a midweek vlog about something significant and dramatic. So, thanks for taking the time to absorb this. I have to confess that I've made a mistake, and I'm here to make amends. This week has been the book launch week for ON THIS BRIGHT DAY: A Year of Reflections for Lasting Food Freedom, and the community has shown great love for the book. However,...

There’s one single reason we’re releasing the weekly vlog on Tuesday rather than our usual Wednesday: IT’S PUBLICATION DAY! On This Bright Day: A Year of Reflections for Lasting Food Freedom is available today in your local bookstore and online. I know a lot of you have been waiting until it was published, so now is the time to head for your bookstore! We have a hashtag we’re using this week: #onthisbrightday. Take a selfie of yourself with the book in a bookstore and put it on social media....

This very week, thousands of people have been introduced to Bright Line Eating. If that’s you: welcome! This week’s vlog is for you. Every Wednesday, I put out a weekly vlog. I’ve been doing it for eight years. It’s also published as an audio file, available wherever you get your podcasts. It’s on our website at brightlineeating.com and on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. If you want to find a past vlog, just go to BrightLineEating.com and click “vlog” and you’ll see a search bar that...

October 11, 2023 - This week, I welcomed a very special guest to the vlog: my beloved mother, Mariah Perkins. We talked about our respective food journeys, and she shared with me some of the thinking that has brought her to where she is today: honest about food and moving forward with clarity in her life and her eating habits. We talked about genetics related to height, weight, and addiction. We talked about my mom’s Susceptibility Score, which sometimes seems low and sometimes seems high,...

October 4, 2023 - I was in full-on rebel mode when I shot this video … because sometimes I hate marketing. What I love is helping people with their food and connecting with people.  My job this week is to talk about my new book, ON THIS BRIGHT DAY: A Year of Reflections for Lasting Food Freedom. I opened the book this morning and it says “Commitment over 51 percent.” Sometimes we don’t have to be fully committed to stay bright. We just need commitment over 51 percent. I also found a reading...

I’ve been struggling with something this past week. It’s a personality trait that’s been problematic my whole life, namely ego, elf-absorption, pride, grandiosity. As an only child, I had the feeling that the world revolved around me. My mom and dad were divorced, and I divided my time between them. When I was with each one, they focused on me 100%. I felt like I was the center of the universe. But I learned as a child you’ll be alone if you come across as too grandiose. I was smart but did...

I recently received a special delivery that brought immense joy. It was a package containing my new book, ON THIS BRIGHT DAY: A Year of Reflections for Lasting Food Freedom. These fresh-off-the-press copies are now on their way to stores across the United States and Canada. I even inscribed one for my husband, David, and penned a heartfelt message in another for myself. As I began reading the book, I noticed how our online community was finding inspiration in its daily reflections. One...

In this Weekly Vlog, I reflect on my 29-year journey of recovery and how a daily meditation reader transformed my life. I want to share four valuable tips for making the most of your daily reader, with a special focus on my upcoming book, ON THIS BRIGHT DAY: A Year of Reflections for Lasting Food Freedom. First and foremost, I can't stress enough the importance of reading the daily page and then meditating, even if it's just for a brief moment. This practice allows me to absorb the powerful...

Today kicks off the official pre-order launch for my new book, ON THIS BRIGHT DAY: A Year of Reflections for Lasting Food Freedom. This is a daily reader that helps you to build your identity every single day. It’s aspirational, inspirational, and grounding, and it’s also tailored to you—as someone who wants, needs, and desires to do differently with your food than the standard diet the rest of the world is eating.  It cements your identity every day. It supports you in being steadfast with...

Imagine a world in which you are parents of two kids who can’t get along. They bicker and fight. But then all of a sudden, they conspire against the parents and hatch a plan to play a prank together on the parents or get away with some nefarious scheme.  Well, I recently discovered that two of my parts—my food indulger and my food controller—have been conspiring against me in this way.  I was living my life, everything was fine. I was in the kitchen one day and I had an apple corer tool...

My kids have been away at summer camp, and I thought this time alone would give me the opportunity to fine tune my morning routine. But it didn’t. When I reflected on this recently, I realized that there is one key habit that is really the linchpin to having a successful morning habit stack. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/6ZOm0xEpisode: Go to Bed Early | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

One of the things that we, as a modern Western society, have lost touch with is the ancient wisdom of how to prepare foods so that they can give us optimum nutrition and even heal us. This week, I have a remarkable story to tell you of a woman who completely reversed her own health, and how she’s helping me with mine. And yes, it’s all science-backed. The woman Susan worked with in Australia is: Amanda Wright WhatsApp number: +61439682120 Click here to read the Pfizer Adverse Events Data...

I read an article the other day, and the headline was “USDA Scientists Create Healthy Menu with 91% of Calories Coming from Ultra-Processed Foods.” Let’s unpack all the ways in which this is SO messed up.  The USDA came up with this menu, and they use the criteria from the NOVA scale, which is well-intentioned but flawed. (I shot a vlog on this particular topic a few months ago.) Among other things, it doesn’t differentiate between healthier processed foods--like tofu, canned vegetables and...

This is a topic I actually wrote about years ago in a blog post. Yes, back before I started producing video blogs—vlogs—on a weekly basis, I wrote actual written blog posts. But that was only for a short time, and I’ve been sending out Weekly Vlogs now for the past eight years. So, I wrote a blog post 8 years ago, but the topic is timely again now. We currently have a group of Boot Campers going through Bright Line Eating Boot Camp 2.0. The Boot Camp includes video modules about developing a...

I have a great habit hack to share with you this week.  I’ve had joint issues for a while now, especially in my shoulder. I recently started doing egoscue, a method founded by Peter Egoscue who was a postural specialist. This involves doing certain exercises to correct your posture. I had been doing physical therapy and I was getting stronger but it wasn’t helping my shoulder and I was getting really frustrated.  So I have 15 minutes of egoscue exercises to do every day. And they’re so...

All of us have days when we’re feeling a little down, unmotivated, or lackluster. Does it make sense to just push through and continue to work for the sake of working? This week, I talk about what to do when you’re in a funk like this, how Parts Work plays into it, and how you can use your BLE tools to help you determine what your next best step is. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/ofmYqJEpisode: The Ebb and Flow of Work | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast 

I used a phrase in a meeting the other day and, to my utter surprise, the team members I was with had never heard it before. It goes like this: “Nobody ever falls off the middle of the wagon.” In other words, make sure that you are solidly entrenched in the community–solidly in the middle of the pack, not dangling off the edge in danger of falling off. When someone joins Alcoholics Anonymous, they are encouraged to do certain things to get engaged as quickly and deeply as possible, such as...

You probably already know about The Susceptibility Quiz. It gives you a Susceptibility Score between 1 and 10. The instructions for the quiz ask you to think back to a period of your life during which your eating habits were at their worst. Then you take the quiz from the perspective of this time period. The reason for this is that once you have the kind of brain that can generate those eating behaviors, you will always need to be more vigilant than someone who has never engaged with food in...

What is the difference between joy and happiness? I was thinking about this recently, so I looked it up and it turns out they are VERY DIFFERENT! And I came to a profound realization about joy and happiness—and how they compare to the feeling of being Bright.FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/Js53C8Episode: Joy vs. Happiness | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast 

I’m so excited to share this week’s topic because it’s especially applicable to the thousands of people who are going through the all-new Boot Camp 2.0 course right now. When you’re just starting Boot Camp for the first time, you’re learning a lot of new things, breaking a lot of bad habits, maybe breaking some addictions, and setting up new behaviors, which is all very willpower-depleting.  When your willpower is depleted—which is what happens until you make these new habits automatic—it...

It’s surprising how many vlogs I film that actually have nothing to do with the food that I eat. But this week, we are in my kitchen making vegan Greek yogurt. I have searched high and low for a plant-based yogurt that tastes good and is high in protein. But I’ve never found one. So I make mine own, and this week I’m sharing the process with you.  Start with a really pure soy milk. I use West Life brand, organic unsweetened vanilla flavor. You need to pick a soy milk that doesn’t have the...